Actually, people didn't really learn about hygene until a couple hundred years after the black death plagues in Europe... By which I mean that people didn't really discover hygene until the late 1800s, whereas the biggest plague outbreak occured in the 1300s (of course, there were various other plagues and epidemics which preceeded and followed, such as the Great Plague of London in the mid 1600s and Justinian's Plague in the 500s.)
No one really knows why the plague suddenly appeared or why it disappeared, only to reappear and disappear again, but it certainly wasn't because fourteenth (or sixth or seventeenth) century peasants had suddenly taken up bathing...
(okay, technically there was an outbreak of plague in the late 1800s/early 1900s, but this was largely in India and China and had nothing to do with the development of hygene in Europe and America.)
As for the lemmings, they don't actually run en masse off cliffs. That's just a myth which Disney made up for a film.
Whoops, having (quite correctly) been corrected by little_e_, I then checked into what she mentioned and in the process found some interesting stuff. Serves me right for not checking my facts first.
Additionally, I found many things about world population (meaning my thoughts weren't original, not particularly surprising, that). Some good stuff is found
I've heard the "we're all going to die!!" mantra before, and I don't believe it. For starters the site is highly sensationalistic (and badly misrepresents modern economics. Strawmen, man, strawmen.) Not to mention that the assertion that alternative energy forms could never provide enough energy is pretty groundless. Second, a majority of the world's population is not as dependent on oil as we are. All of those people out in the boonies of India and China and the like are not going to suddenly fall over if Americans can't drive their SUVs anymore. And fourth, I just don't think the energy companies are so stupid that they aren't even aware of their own projected oil production and aren't looking to diversify into other sources
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No one really knows why the plague suddenly appeared or why it disappeared, only to reappear and disappear again, but it certainly wasn't because fourteenth (or sixth or seventeenth) century peasants had suddenly taken up bathing...
(okay, technically there was an outbreak of plague in the late 1800s/early 1900s, but this was largely in India and China and had nothing to do with the development of hygene in Europe and America.)
As for the lemmings, they don't actually run en masse off cliffs. That's just a myth which Disney made up for a film.
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The Disney/Lemmings thing is detailed here:http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/lemmings.htm
Additionally, I found many things about world population (meaning my thoughts weren't original, not particularly surprising, that). Some good stuff is found
here:http://dieoff.org/synopsis.htm . I cannot however say how fair/balanced/scientifically sound this is.
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